Some special events really are special. My Water Management class at OLLI has been outstanding. But to make it more outstanding, one morning class was replaced by an afternoon on-site presentation by a professional landscape architect who showed us the environmental considerations he addressed in designing a local private school, one near my home. The 50 acre property, with the school grounds occupying about a third of that, sits at a geological interface, an eastern area of Blue Rock gneiss to the east where I live and a section of a larger Wissahickon Formation to the west. The western drainage of water has greater capacity, so the property design needed to move rainwater preferentially in that direction. There are also two creeks, Rocky Run now behind some shopping centers, and a western creek. By modifying the land with drainage channels directed toward the creeks, for the most part the water could be directed to where it needed to be with little underground pipe construction.
And there were a lot of rocks, some quite large. Since the property was being designed for young children with remediable learning disabilities, the needs of the children who would be attending and the parents paying tuition rates not much different than an Ivy League university took priority. Fencing provided safety, but those Blue Rocks, often boulders, could be repurposed as walking bridges across the channels, lookouts strategically placed to give a few teachers a comprehensive view of long swaths of play area. Placement of classrooms allowed children to see selected parts of the grounds as their teachers taught the basics of geology or plants.
One of the more intriguing afternoons, though a rather long one on a day I felt a little less than my best.
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